Is It Just Me, Or Is It Cold In Here?

Along with air-conditioning, globalization has also helped popularize something called Ashrae 55: a building code created by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, to determine the ideal temperature for large buildings. The standard, which has set thermostats across the globe, is hardly culture-free. It’s based on Fanger’s Comfort Equation, a mathematical model developed in Denmark and the United States in the 1960s and ’70s, which seeks to make a very specific worker comfortable: a man wearing a full business suit.

Consider the impact on office workers in hotter countries, where a thobe or a dashiki might be perfectly acceptable business attire. They might start dressing differently, which makes them less comfortable outside and at home, which in turn makes them more likely to seek out air-conditioning. It also affects women. “In spring, it’s socially expected that women will wear thinner blouses, skirts, open-toed shoes,” Mazur-Stommen says. “But the building temperature is set for men, who are assumed to be wearing long-sleeved shirts and closed-toed shoes year-round. If everyone just dressed appropriately for the weather, we wouldn’t have to heat or cool the building as much.”

Maybe this explains why my office is cold year-round, and why I am particularly aware of that fact in warm weather, when I’m likely to be in shirt sleeves. I’ve been in that office for more than a dozen years now, and from very early on I have kept a sweater to wear all year round: even when it’s 95 degrees outside, my office is likely to be chilly. (Sometimes in lieu of the sweater I open a window and let the hot air in.)

There are several interesting points to note about this story. The first is that the most technologically advanced societies — the ones whose technologies then get sold to or adopted by the rest of the world — are the ones who set the standards that everyone else is supposed to live by. (More particularly, a certain rather small group of people within those societies make the decisions for everyone else.)

The second is that there is a “standard”: that “comfortable temperature” is not to be established by the preferences of the people who have to work in any given building, but by people who may live thousands of miles away, and who may have lived decades in the past. I can’t do anything to affect the temperature in my office, even though I am its only occupant and have been so for years.

The third is that the forcible implementation of such a standard around the world may well increase rather than lower costs. No doubt all such bureaucratized, rationalized rules are inevitably implemented in the name of “efficiency.” But names can be misleading, that one more than most.

Alan, either they are lying to you, or the Texas you are moving to is on some other planet. I’ve lived in Texarkana and College Station, and in both cities needed all of the air conditioning I could get.

THIS. I never wear skirts without tights in the summer because of the temp in the office. Many of the women have space heaters at their desks, making the energy issue all that more ridiculous. Growing up in the San Fernando Valley in SoCal every restaurant was air-conditioned within an inch of its life all summer and Mom always instructed us to bring a sweater in 100+ degree weather.

What baffles me most about heating and cooling in Texas is that most people here find the idea of opening windows to be utterly alien, even in residential settings. For about three months a year, that’s sensible. For the other three seasons, it entails running air conditioning that could easily be replaced by a decent breeze in the morning and evening. But a shocking number of windows have no screens, are painted shut, or are purely ornamental. If the electrical grid shut down for a few days during a heat wave, everyone would need to camp out in the back yard just to get some sleep.

It’s a tyranny of uniformity that commends machines over cooling by natural air flow. I’d much rather have a little of the outdoor temperature variation reflected in more flexible indoor standards, instead of living in domed colonies like a lunar explorer.

I’ll offer this as an anecdote. A close friend who is in the HVAC business tells me that heating system standards, in the Northeast at least, were determined by the 1914 flu epidemic. Open windows were believed to be prophylactic (they are, of course, but there’s a limit), and heating systems were designed to keep a room toasty warm with all the windows open in a northeastern winter. (I know from experience that they can do it, when the thermostat responds to the temperature in another apartment where someone left the windows open, so that I have to open all of mine too.)

I grew up, in the Sixties, in Hawai’i, which has a nice moderate temperature. About 15 years ago, I was back home and I noticed air conditioners in the schoolroom windows. What’s with that? Coast haole expectations?

I have found that even in a workplace with local thermostat control, the people who run hotter tend to have their way, because they can say, “Well you can put on a sweater, but if it’s too hot I just have to suffer!”